The ruling said the justices could not find Chatham County Superior Court Judge Penny Haas Freesemann “clearly erred” in her assessment that Bobby Lavon Buckner was denied a speedy trial.

“We cannot say that (Freesemann’s) ultimate conclusion, which appears reasoned and reasonable, amounts to an abuse of discretion,” Justice Keith Blackwell wrote for the court. “Accordingly we must affirm the judgment,”

Freesemann ruled May 30 that prosecutors had denied Buckner his constitutional rights by continued delay for 53 months from indictment and dismissed the case.

Moore, a seventh-grade honor student at DeRenne Middle School, disappeared from her home at 6 Weiner Drive early April 18, 2003. The disappearance prompted an extensive search in Savannah and South Carolina before her body was discovered nearly three weeks later near the Savannah Marriott Riverfront.

Buckner, her mother’s live-in boyfriend, was arrested April 19, 2003, for violating the conditions of his probation. Buckner, a convicted sex offender, was arrested after police learned he had been alone with Ashleigh and two other children. He later pleaded guilty to several sex crimes involving four children other than Ashleigh and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He has remained in custody since.

Buckner, 36, was indicted by the Chatham County grand jury in December 2007 for murder, kidnapping and child molestation, then re-indicted in May 2009 and a third time in March 2011.

Prosecutors announced in April 2011 they would seek the death penalty, then dropped that request in August 2011.

In December 2011, Buckner’s defense attorneys filed their motion to dismiss because of speedy trial violations.

Freesemann, in a 36-page ruling, found prosecutors’ delays had violated those rights and, in what she called a “harsh” remedy, “reluctantly dismissed the indictment.”

She called that ruling “the only possible remedy allowed under the law.”

The Supreme Court ruling Monday found Freesemann’s ruling had “carefully and thoroughly explained its reasons for concluding that Buckner was denied his right to a speedy trial.”

The court found that, “The trial court appears to have thought that someone in the office of the prosecuting attorney ought to have carefully reviewed the case file long before December 2010, and that it should have occurred to someone in that office long before March 2011 that the death penalty perhaps ought to be sought. Such thoughts are not unreasonable ones.

“After all, in a case like this one — involving a convicted sex offender accused of murdering, kidnapping and sexually abusing a child — the idea that the death penalty perhaps might be warranted is hardly a novel one.”

Buckner’s lead defense lawyer, Newell M. Hamilton Jr. with the state’s Capital Defenders office, said Monday his team was “very satisfied with the ruling of the Supreme Court.

“I think it is justice done. The law worked the way it should.”

Chatham County District Attorney Meg Daly Heap, who inherited the case from her predecessor, said Monday that Freesemann “meticulously recounted in her 36-page order why she believed dismissal was legally required.

“Today, her decision was affirmed by the state’s highest court, the Georgia Supreme Court,” Heap said. “The court found that the District Attorney’s Office did not do its job. I will do everything I can to ensure that my prosecutors are fully prepared and ready in court.”

Buckner remains in state custody under a 20-year sentence in an unrelated crime. He was transferred June 4 from the Chatham County jail to a state prison in Calhoun County.